Inside the Opium Trade & Washington’s Hidden Agenda

Afghanistan is the world’s biggest exporter of black-market opium from which heroin is made.

It’s a multi-billion dollar business, responsible for around a hundred thousand deaths every year and it’s a major source of income for terrorists. RT Doc travelled to the poppy fields where death is harvested to find out why no one can put a stop to this deadly trade.

When it comes to heroin, a non-intervention policy is still going strong in Afghanistan where over 90% of the world’s black market opium is produced. Most finds its way onto the international drug market and the profits fund organized crime and terrorist groups like ISIS, which is growing in strength here.

The dealers and manufacturers aren’t hard to find: they live in luxurious houses, have fields blooming with poppies and sell their narcotic wares in broad daylight. Even so, they still manage to evade arrest. Poppy fields are destroyed and drugs seized but it’s only ever the middle men who are punished, not the drug lords. There’s been a NATO military presence in the country for 14 years now but still, drugs production continues to grow.

Local people suffer from the drug business too, around 18% of the capital’s population are drug addicts. The places where drugs are sold and used are well known but the police are powerless to act. Mafia wars drive civilians from their land in the southern regions, forcing them into refugee camps in their own country. Opium growers get rich by plunging fellow citizens into the depths of misery.

RT Doc’s investigative team visited Afghanistan to document the Police’s losing battle against opium producers and its effect on the rest of the country. They talk to police officers, drug users and opium growers in search of a fuller picture and to ask why this massive and life-destroying industry continues to flourish.

The Afghan Drug Trade and the Elephant in the Room

Foreign Policy magazine this month features an article entitled “Think Again: The Afghan Drug Trade“, which is a decent overview of the opium problem – as far as it goes. Unsurprisingly, however, in doing so, it proverbially ignores the elephant in the room, and in doing so represents part of the problem rather than the solution.

To its credit, the article begins by dispelling the myth that the drug trade in Afghanistan is virtually controlled by the Taliban, observing that “In the popular and American political imaginations, the Taliban are thought to be the big winners from this [Afghanistan’s] near monopoly [on global opium production]”, but the truth is “The Taliban take 2 to 12 percent of a $4 billion industry”.

This is rare candor for a mainstream publication – it’s more typical to see the U.S. media misleading the public on the role anti-government elements play in the drug trade (I discussed both these points in “New York Times Misleads on Taliban Role in Opium Trade“, Foreign Policy Journal, November 29, 2008).

But the authors neglect to draw the corollary, rather leaving it up to readers to put two and two together and realize that this means that the lion’s share of the Afghan drug trade is under the control of elements friendly to the Afghan government and/or the foreign occupying forces.

HSBC Bank: Secret Origins To Laundering The World's Drug Money

The American families Perkins, Astor and Forbes made millions off the opium trade. The Perkins’ founded Bank of Boston, which is today known as Credit Suisse First Boston. The Perkins and Morgan families endowed Harvard University. William Hathaway Forbes was a director at Hong Kong Shanghai Bank shortly after it was founded in 1866. John Murray Forbes was the US agent for the Barings banking family, which financed most of the early drug trade. The Forbes family heirs later launched Forbes magazine. Steve Forbes ran for President in 1996. John Jacob Astor invested his opium proceeds in Manhattan real estate and worked for British intelligence. The Astor family home in London sits opposite Chatham House.

These families launched the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation (HSBC) after the second Opium War as a repository for their opium proceeds. HSBC, a subsidiary of the London-based HSBC Holdings, today prints 75% of Hong Kong’s currency, while the British Cecil Rhodes-founded Standard Chartered Bank prints the rest. HSBC’s Hong Kong headquarters sits next to a massive Masonic Temple.

Afghan Opium for Bankers and TerroristsThere is a general impression that Afghanistan has always been the center of opium production.

In fact, it has not. Prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, opium production in Afghanistan was less than 1,000 tons; that grew to 8,200 tons (based on conservative UN Office on Drugs and Crime/UNODC figures) in 2008. Throughout this period,

Afghanistan was in a state of war. Following the Soviet invasion, the anti-Soviet powers, particularly, the US, UK, and Saudi Arabia, began generating larger amounts of drug money to finance much of the war to defeat the Soviets. Since 1989, after the Soviet withdrawal, there has been an all-out civil war in Afghanistan, as the US-UK-Saudi-created mujahideen dipped further into the opium/heroin money.

The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade

Washington's Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade

Since the US led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Golden Crescent opium trade has soared. According to the US media, this lucrative contraband is protected by Osama, the Taliban, not to mention, of course, the regional warlords, in defiance of the “international community”.
The heroin business is said to be “filling the coffers of the Taliban”. In the words of the US State Department:

“Opium is a source of literally billions of dollars to extremist and criminal groups… [C]utting down the opium supply is central to establishing a secure and stable democracy, as well as winning the global war on terrorism,”(Statement of Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles. Congressional Hearing, 1 April 2004)

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), opium production in Afghanistan in 2003 is estimated at 3,600 tons, with an estimated area under cultivation of the order of 80,000 hectares. (UNODC at http://www.unodc.org/unodc/index.html ).
An even larger bumper harvest is predicted for 2004.

The State Department suggests that up to 120 000 hectares were under cultivation in 2004. (Congressional Hearing, op cit):

”We could be on a path for a significant surge. Some observers indicate perhaps as much as 50 percent to 100 percent growth in the 2004 crop over the already troubling figures from last year.”

Washington’s Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade

In the wake of the 2001 US bombing of Afghanistan, the British government of Tony Blair was entrusted by the G-8 Group of leading industrial nations to carry out a drug eradication program, which would, in theory, allow Afghan farmers to switch out of poppy cultivation into alternative crops. The British were working out of Kabul in close liaison with the US DEA’s “Operation Containment”.

The UK sponsored crop eradication program is an obvious smokescreen. Since October 2001, opium poppy cultivation has skyrocketed. The presence of occupation forces in Afghanistan did not result in the eradication of poppy cultivation. Quite the opposite.
The Taliban prohibition had indeed caused “the beginning of a heroin shortage in Europe by the end of 2001″, as acknowledged by the UNODC.

Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.

Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.
In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.

He has filed legal action against Booz Allen Hamilton and the Department of Defense for their involvement in secret Swiss Bank Terrorist Finance Operations, which he uncovered with the help of Union Bank of Switzerland whistleblower, Brad Birkenfeld.

Asian terror gangs target UK with killer heroin

Pakistani and Afghan-based al-Qaida and Taliban warlords are sitting on a £6billion stash of deadly heroin. A senior security source told the Daily Star Sunday: “The Afghan poppy fields are probably the biggest financial contributor to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

“The UK’s heroin trade is increasing at an alarming rate and most of the cash helps arm terrorists with bombs and guns.”

Between 1990 and 2005 Taliban-linked drug peddler Haji Baz Mohammed raked in a staggering £17billion by pouring heroin into North America.
He told a US court that “selling heroin was a jihad because they were taking Americans’ money and the heroin was killing them”.

Now the fanatics have made the UK their top target. A whopping 30 tonnes of heroin is being smuggled into Britain every year.

The drug is grown in the Afghan badlands and bought for £1,500 a kilo in neighbouring Pakistan.
It’s finally sold on Britain’s streets, often in the backs of cabs or over kebab shop counters, at between £30 and £50 a gram.

How MI6, CIA spend tax money on propping up drug production

So, how is MI6 secretly spending UK taxpayers' money in Afghanistan? According to Western media reporting, it is being used to prop up warlords and corrupt officials. This is deeply unpopular amongst the Afghan people, leading to the danger of increasing support for a resurgent Taliban.

There is also a significant overlap between the corrupt political establishment and the illegal drug trade, up to and including the president's late brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. So, another unintentional consequence may be that some of this unaccountable ghost money is propping up the drug trade.

We apparently have MI6 and the CIA secretly bankrolling the very people in Afghanistan who produce 90 percent of the world's heroin.